Mud, Sweat and Beers: A Cultural History of Sport and Alcoholby Tony Collins and Wray Vamplew224pp, Berg, £42.99/£14.99

In The Cricketer Annual of 1935, Johnny Walker was asked what the difference was between a cricket ball and a good whisky. "A cricket ball," said Johnny Walker, taking one in his hand, "has got a seam - you can see and feel where the join comes. But a good whisky like Johnny Walker is somewhat like a billiard ball, perfectly round, perfectly smooth..." Just so. The function of a pub has never been merely to provide drink.

Ideally, it is a centre of news, scandal, propositions, bets, diversions, conversation, entertainment, somewhere just to pass the time, to meet before the match - in short, the crack, until it got called the craic.

As an Irishman, I thought I knew a fair deal about drink and sport. But when I first went to England in 1967, as a student in search of summer work, I began to realise that the two are much more deeply intertwined in the English psyche. Not only did their pubs have an impressive array of bar games such as darts, shove ha'penny, shovelboard, bagatelle, dominoes, and backgammon, as well as the more eccentric Aunt Sally, and knur and spell (a ball and bat game); but some had their own skittle alleys, bowling greens, and cricket fields.

In the 18th century, we learn from this excellent book, London pubs staged matches that pitted teams of one-armed and one-legged players against each other, one man and a dog versus two gentlemen, and a team of married women against a team of maidens.

The pub has been host to a plethora of sports and games such as boxing, wrestling, tennis, cock-fighting, coursing, quoiting, curling, bear-baiting, badger-baiting, occasional ape-baiting, and rat-catching. Pigeon-shooting in pubs declined in popularity when the Prince of Wales decided to stop attending pigeon-shooting contests at Hurlingham, allegedly because his wife objected to the huge number of birds killed. Shooting disappeared entirely as a pub sport with the introduction of the Firearms Control Act of 1920, which severely restricted the availability of guns in the wake of concerns about the revolution in Russia and the insurrection in Ireland.

The common pub name, the Dog and Duck, generally refers to the use of dogs to hunt a duck whose wings have been pinioned, its only means of escape being to dive to the bottom of the pond owned by the landlord. The largest of these was in London, owned by a Mr Ball, and commemorated in the name Balls Pond Road.

Then, in the 1880s, sport as we now know it started to take over. "One would look in vain now," wrote one commentator in 1885, "for the announcements of pugilistic encounters between bruisers... cock-fights... and performances of terrier dogs... within the last five-and-twenty years cricket and football clubs have been formed in all the towns and most of the villages of England."

The big breweries moved in. In the 1930s Guinness, then as now at the forefront of innovative advertising, claimed that their product built strong muscles and fed exhausted nerves; it also soothed disappointment. "You're out of luck, your score was a duck / From fielding your feet are quite sore. / Now by missing a catch, you've just lost the match. / What is it a lovely day for? / Lovely day for a Guinness."

Of course, many sportsmen took this advice to excess (the well-publicised lapses of Jimmy Greaves, George Best, and, more latterly, Tony Adams and Paul Merson). But, as this book points out, "Clearly some sportsmen... do stupid things under the influence of alcohol, but then so do many young men: and that is what most sportsmen are."

The authors also refute the notion that alcohol causes hooliganism, citing the example of the "Roligans" of Denmark (from rolig, the Danish word for peace), who "combine prodigious drinking feats with an equally large reputation for good humour and non-violence". (They sound Irish to me.) Prohibition is invariably counter-productive. "The desire to relax with alcohol and amuse oneself with games," they conclude, "is almost as old as human culture itself."

Mud, Sweat and Beers is packed with informative and entertaining detail. Mildly academic in tone - but written with exemplary clarity - it is priced for the academic market. It deserves a wider readership.

· Ciaran Carson's translation of Dante's Inferno is published by Granta in November